Walk in Hell (80 page)

“I’se fo’ty-fo’—I think,” Scipio answered.

“All right.” The clerk wrote that down, too. “Even if you took your black ass down to the recruiting station, they wouldn’t stick you in butternut, so we ain’t real likely to lose you anyhow, ain’t that right?”

“I reckon not,” Scipio said. All of a sudden, things made more sense. “You losin’ a lot o’ de hands to de war, suh?”

“Too damn many,” the clerk said. “Always knew niggers was crazy. You got to be crazy if you want the chance of gettin’ shot and next to no money while you’re doin’ it.” He scratched by the patch yet again. “I been through all that, and I purely don’t see the point to it.”

“Me neither, suh,” Scipio said. But he did, though he wouldn’t say so to a white man. The clerk had gone to war along with his peers, masters of what they surveyed. If Negroes put on butternut, they hoped to gain some measure of the equality the clerk took for granted.

“Well, that’s as may be,” the one-eyed white man said. “Pay is two dollars an’ fifty cents a day. You start tomorrow mornin’, half past seven. You make sure you’re here on time.”

“Yes, suh. I do dat, suh.” Scipio had expected warnings far more dire. That this one was so mild told him how badly the mill needed workers. So did their attitude toward his papers, or lack of same. The clerk called him
nigger
in every other sentence, but the clerk had undoubtedly called every black he saw a nigger from the day he learned how to talk. He did it more to identify than to demean.

Scipio went looking for a room at a boardinghouse, and found one not far from the cotton mill. The manager of the building, a skinny, wizened Negro who called himself Aurelius, said, “We’s right glad to have you, Jeroboam, and that’s a fac’. Lots o’ folks is leavin’ here fo’ to join the Army. Up from the Congaree country, is you?”

“Dat right,” Scipio said. Aurelius’ accent was different from his, closer to the way the white folks of Greenville spoke than to the Low Country dialect Scipio had learned on the Marshlands plantation.

Aurelius scratched his head. His hair had more gray in it than Scipio’s. “You know somethin’, Jeroboam?” he said. “If I thought they’d let me tote a rifle, I’d join the Army my own self. Reckon I wouldn’t mind votin’ an’ all them other things the white folks is givin’ to niggers who goes to war for ’em.”

“Maybe,” was all Scipio said. Having fought against the Confederate government, having the blood of a Confederate officer on his hands, he didn’t think he wanted to put on butternut himself, even had he been young enough for recruiters to want him.

His room was bigger and cleaner and cost less than the one in Columbia. Being just a mill town rather than the state capital, Greenville didn’t have to put on airs. The work Scipio got was marginally easier than what he’d been doing before. Instead of hauling crates of shell casings from one place to another, he loaded bolts of coarse butternut-dyed cloth onto pallets so someone else could haul them off to the cutting rooms.

Two days after he got the job, the young Negro who had been hauling those pallets quit. Another young black took his place. This one lasted a week. A third Negro held the position two days. All three of them resigned to put on that butternut cloth once it had been made into uniforms.

Scipio saw his first black man in Confederate uniform a little more than a week after he came to Greenville. Three big, tough-looking Negroes in butternut came down Park Avenue side by side. They swaggered along as if they owned the sidewalk. Blacks of all ages and both sexes stared at them as if they’d fallen from the moon. Scipio was one of those who stared. He wondered if any of the brand-new soldiers had worn the red armband of the Congaree Socialist Republic the winter before.

As the uniformed Negroes strode along the avenue, sighs rose up from every woman around. If the men in butternut were out for a good time, their problem would be picking and choosing, not finding.

That much, though, Scipio could have guessed beforehand. He found watching whites far more interesting. They stared at the Negroes in uniform, too. Their attitude was more nearly astonishment and uncertainty than delight. Their legislators had passed the bill authorizing Negro soldiers. Now that they were confronted with the reality, they didn’t know what to make of it.

A white captain, perhaps home on leave, came out of a shop on Park Avenue. The three Negroes snapped to attention and gave him salutes so precise, they might have been machined. The captain stopped and looked the black men over.
Damnfool buckra,
Scipio thought.
If a white officer doesn’t treat them like soldiers, who will?

But the captain, though half a beat late, did return the salutes. Then he did something better, something smarter: he nodded to the three Negroes before he went on his way. They nodded back; one of them saluted again. The captain gravely returned that salute, too. He hadn’t acknowledged them as his equals, but they weren’t his equals in the Army. He had acknowledged them as belonging to the same team he did. In the Confederacy, that was epochal in and of itself.

A sigh ran through blacks and whites alike. Everyone recognized what had happened. Not everyone, Scipio saw, was happy with it. That didn’t surprise him. What did surprise him was that none of the whites on Park Avenue raised a fuss. The three Negro soldiers found a saloon and went into it one after another.

More and more blacks in butternut began appearing as time went by. A couple of weeks after Scipio saw his first colored recruits, he was going home from the mill when a white corporal stopped a black man in Confederate uniform. The white man had his right arm in a sling. In a voice more curious than anything else, he asked, “Nigger, why the hell you want to take the chance of getting a present like this one here?” He wiggled the fingers sticking out of his cast.

The Negro came to attention before he spoke. “Co’p’ral, suh,” he said, “my big brother, he was in one o’ they labor battalions, an’ a damnyankee shell done kilt him. He didn’t have no gun. He couldn’t do nothin’ about it. Them damnyankees ain’t gwine shoot at me without I shoots back.”

“All right. That’s an answer, by Jesus,” the corporal said. “Kill a couple o’ them bastards for your brother, then kill a couple for your own self.”

“That’s what I aims to do,” the Negro said.

Scipio was very thoughtful all the way back to his boardinghouse. After the CSA pounded the Congaree Socialist Republic into the ground, he’d been convinced everything Cassius and Cherry and the rest of the Marxist revolutionaries had tried to achieve had died with the Republic. He wasn’t so sure, not any more. Maybe Negroes were getting a taste of greater freedom after all, even if not in the way the Reds had aimed to give it to them. And maybe, just maybe, the struggles of the Congaree Socialist Republic hadn’t been in vain.

When the field hands lined up in the morning, two more men were missing. “Where did Hephaestion and Orestes disappear to?” Anne Colleton asked. “Are they off somewhere getting drunk?” Instead of sounding furious, she hoped that was what the two stalwart hands were doing.

But the field foreman, a grizzled buck named Maximus, shook his head. “No, ma’am,” he said. “Dey is on de way to St. Matthews—dey leave befo’ de fust light o’ dawn.” Maximus had an unconsciously poetic way of speaking. “Dey say dey gwine be sojers.”

“Did they?” Anne bit down on the inside of her lower lip. She had helped get the bill allowing Negro soldiers passed, and now she was paying the price for it. In front of the hands, she had to keep up a bold façade. “Well, we’ll make do one way or another. Let’s get to work.”

Out to the fields and to their garden plots trooped the Negroes. The young men among them had found a loophole in the silent agreement they’d made with her after the Congaree Socialist Republic collapsed. If they joined the Confederate Army, they didn’t need her to shield them from authority—and they didn’t need to do as she said.

Grimly, Anne headed back toward her cabin. She had letters to write, bills to pay. How she was supposed to put in a proper crop of cotton next year if all her hands departed was beyond her. Her shoulders stiffened. She’d managed a crop of sorts after the Red uprising. If she’d worked one miracle, she figured she could work another. She’d have to, so she would do it.

Julia was already busy in the cabin, feather duster in one hand, baby in the crook of her other elbow. She couldn’t join the Army. Anne appraised her as coldbloodedly as if she’d been a mule. She wouldn’t be much good out in the fields, either.

“Mornin’, ma’am,” Julia said, unaware of the scrutiny or ignoring it. “It gwine be Christmastime any day now.”

“So it will,” Anne said. She’d driven into Columbia a few days before, and sent Tom half a dozen pairs of leather-and-wool gloves. She’d also bought a crate of the usual trinkets for the workers on the plantation. She couldn’t make herself believe they deserved anything but the back of her hand, but couldn’t afford any more trouble with them. She had troubles enough. A little bribery never hurt anything, and a congressman, for instance, would have been far more expensive.

“De tree sho’ smell fine,” Julia said. “Jus’ a little feller dis yeah, not like in de old days.”

In the old days, Anne had had the halls of Marshlands in which to set a tree that
was
a tree. Here in the low-roofed cottage, this sapling would have to do. She was making the best show she could with tinsel and a cheap glass star on top.

Julia cleaned at a glacial pace. Anne had learned hurrying her was useless. She would just look hurt and stare down at her baby. She’d been slow before she had the baby. She was slower now. Anne waited impatiently. Maybe she let the impatience show. Julia dropped and shattered the chamber pot, then spent what felt like half an hour sweeping up shards of china. Anne was ready to kick her by the time she finally left the cottage.

At last, the mistress of Marshlands, such as there was of Marshlands these days, got down to her own work without anyone peering over her shoulder. She was gladder by the day that she’d been in fine financial shape before the war started. She wouldn’t be in fine shape by the time it was done. If she survived, though, she knew she’d be able to get her own back once peace finally returned.

She picked up the telephone mouthpiece to call a broker down in Charleston. The line was dead. She said something pungently unladylike. Nothing worked the way it was supposed to, not any more. It was either write another letter or drive into St. Matthews to send a telegram. She wrote the letter. More and more these days, she felt nothing at Marshlands got done unless she stayed here to see it get done.

To add to her foul mood, the postman was late. When he finally did show, up, he rode toward her with a bigger armed escort than usual. “You want to watch yourself, ma’am,” he said. “They say them Red niggers is feelin’ fractious.”

“They say all sorts of things,” Anne answered coldly. She took the envelopes and periodicals the fellow gave her and handed him the letters she’d written. He stuck those in his saddlebag and rode off.

Once he was gone, she regretted snapping at him. The guards accompanying him argued that people in St. Matthews were taking seriously the threat from Cassius’ diehards.

She checked her pistol. It lay under her pillow, where it was supposed to be. Wondering if Julia or one of the other Negroes had pulled its teeth, she checked that, too. No: it was fully loaded. That eased her mind somewhat, arguing as it did that the Marshlands Negroes didn’t expect an imminent visit from their friends and comrades skulking in the swamps of the Congaree.

“Comrades.” The word tasted bad in her mouth. Now that the Reds had degraded it, it wasn’t a word decent people in the Confederate States could use comfortably any more. No sooner had that thought crossed her mind than she laughed at herself. Before the war, she’d had nothing but contempt for the stodgy, boring folk who counted for the Confederacy’s decent people. Now she reckoned herself one of them.

She laughed again, though it wasn’t funny. It was either laugh or scream. The Red uprising had proved as painfully as possible how much she had in common with her fellow white Confederate Americans.

Julia brought in chicken and dumplings for supper. Anne ate, hardly noticing the plate in front of her. Her body servant took it away. Anne lighted the lamps, one by one. They didn’t give her proper light by which to read, but they were what she had. She wasn’t holding her breath about getting electricity restored to Marshlands, any more than she was about getting back a telegraph line. On the off chance, she tried the telephone again. It was still silent, too. She snarled at it.

A couple of magazines told in great detail how the CSA might yet win the war. She would have had more faith in them if they hadn’t contradicted each other in so many places. She also would have had more faith in them if either author had shown more signs he knew what he was talking about and wasn’t whistling in the dark.

She poured herself a cup of coffee. The coffee remained good. As long as the Caribbean remained a Confederate lake, imports from Central and South America could still reach Galveston, New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola.

However good it was, the coffee did nothing to keep her awake. She drank it so regularly, it had next to no effect on her. When she started yawning over a particularly abstruse piece on Russia’s chances against the Germans and Austrians in 1917, she set down the magazine, blew out all the lamps but the one by her bed, and changed into a nightgown. Then she blew out the last lamp and went to bed.

She woke up sometime in the middle of the night. As she’d tossed and turned, her right hand had slipped under the pillow. It was resting on the revolver. That, though, wasn’t what had wakened her. “Coffee,” she muttered under her breath. She reached down for the chamber pot, only to discover it wasn’t there and remember why. Off to the privy, then—no help for it.

Her lips twisted in frustrated anger as she started to get out of bed. Marshlands had had flush toilets longer than she’d been alive; it had been one of the first plantation houses in South Carolina to enjoy such an amenity. She’d taken indoor plumbing for granted. The refugee camp had taught her it was too precious, too wonderful, not to be properly admired—and, at the moment, she had not so much as a pot to call her own.